WebsiteAccessibility.com

Meaningful Link Text

Jun 21st, 2011 at 11:44 am

When creating links on a page it is very important to use meaningful link text. It can be confusing if you have links like “Click Here”, “More”, “Buy”, etc. If you fail to provide any link text, the screen reader will look for something else to use, like the SRC attribute.

Try to imagine you are speaking to a friend over the telephone. Read the link text to your friend. Could s/he understand from your reading what the link really does?

This is also very good for Search Engine Optimization. The Search Engine Bot cannot see the image and will use the ALT attribute.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Works With

ALT and TITLE attributes in the IMG tag

Browser

Screen Reader

Results

IE 9

JAWS 12

Yes

FF 4

JAWS 12

Yes

Standards:

WCAG 2.0 SC 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context): The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context, except where the purpose of the link would be ambiguous to users in general. (Level A)